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Monday, November 7, 2011

Casual about sexual abuse in America?

I've written here, before, about Bishop Finn, Sean Ratigan and the Catholic Church, of course, and all their sexual abuse issues and problems that have sprung up in the last several months. My "take-away" from that is that Bishop Finn should have been more pro-active on this situation, from when the principal first wrote him, from up in St. Joseph, to later, when pictures of children were known to be on Ratigan's computer. That seems easy enough to admit whether you think Bishop Finn should or should not be now charged with breaking Missouri laws. My point is, with their issues, the second anyone was aware there was a problem, people should have been all over it, addressing it, looking into it and seeing if there were anything they needed to know further and whether, possibly, it needed to be reported to the police. Now, there is the situation of reported sexual abuse by an assistant coach at Penn State and it seems as though the situation is, at least a bit, very similar. People reported things and then, well, they were looked into, but people took their time. As of Sunday evening, it's being reported that Coach Joe Paterno was informed of possible sexual abuse. Fortunately, he did report it. But check this out--he didn't report it until the next day. The next day. If you read that link, below, about the timeline, again and again, people put off the reporting, in spite of a first hand account of at least one incident. And that's what gets me about this and why it seems very like the Bishop Finn/Sean Ratigan/Catholic Church situation. Sexual abuse ought to be treated like, I don't know, someone bleeding. If someone came up to you and said someone had been cut badly with a saw or something, we'd run to them, check it out, call the ambulance and get right on it. If you read the second link, below, about this Penn State situation, you'll see the incident that finally got this investigation started was delayed, again and again. Instead of looking into each situation quickly, for the crimes they are, we dilly-dally and put it off and maybe--or maybe not--check it out and the victims suffer. That needs to change. Link: http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-wetzel_paterno_statement_raises_more_questions110611; http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/press.aspx?id=6270; http://www.npr.org/2011/11/07/142085416/curley-schultz-step-down-amid-penn-state-scandal?ft=1&f=1001